Expert Financial & Business Insights for South Africa
Strategic analysis from Idea Accelerator and ready-to-publish content from Financial News Daily.
The experts will tell you that if you want to create new ideas all you need to do is get out a pen or pencil and stare at a blank sheet of paper and write down your ideas.
Has this ever worked for you?
I’ve found that it’s very difficult unless you come prepared to you blank sheet and at least have some questions in hand that can spur your imagination. Continue reading “When you’re stuck for ideas, try these three questions”
I have a friend who’s always been interested in sports. He’s played golf with a close to scratch handicap, was the club champion in tennis and was a provincial surfer. In his middle years he developed a large mid-drift and it looked as though he was going to be carrying these couple of extra kilograms around with him for the rest of his life.
But over the past year he has started a brand-new sport – running. From small beginnings, running a few kilometres each morning, he has developed his running, his determination, passion, careful exercise and diet to a level where he now can run up to 16 km at one stretch. It’s amazing to look at how his weight has peeled away and in its place is a healthier, vigourous looking body. His face shines with a new glow and he now possesses the energy to do what he wants with his life. Continue reading “Have you identified your key drivers?”
A woman from the UK landed up in the town of Worcester in the Western Cape and decided that she wanted to make the town her home. What ideas do you think she came up with to make an income that would enable to live in this scenic town in South African wine lands? Scroll down to the end of this post to see the answer.
What makes this number unique?
8,549,176,320
Find out the answer when you scroll to the bottom of this post.
For some people brain teasers like this seem silly or even stupid. Yet the point here is that they show how we are all faced with challenges and need to solve them through creative thinking. The answer to the women who landed up in Worcester in the Western Cape wasn’t solved overnight by her. She would have taken much longer to work out how she was going to make a living for herself, perhaps for many years, compared to the answer to the number poser, which you may have already solved yourself. Continue reading “Shift your creativity into higher gear”
Small business owners are faced with many decisions that determine the success or poor performance of their business. Each day small business and start-up owners make decisions that will improve or increase business or lead to loss. Routine decisions such as what stock to buy and which products to discount may not sink a business but ones that are more strategic such as introducing a new product or entering a new market could have severe consequences.
Business owners need to decide on many issues. These include what sort of business model to develop, development of a new product or service, how to go about commercialising a new product, what market research to carry out to test and market and what marketing plan they need to introduce.
An online publishing start-up Liquid State developed their product for a year but soon realised that they needed to rebuild their product. They built a new version of the product which wasn’t flawed but was not suitable for the customers they wanted to pursue. The new product has grown rapidly and the business has been awarded accolades for high-growth start-ups. The customer base has grown 30 times since their start up.
What do you think about the decisions that you are making in your business? How many of them do you feel have worked and how many have not? Have you thought about ways to improve your decisions?
A lot of research has gone into finding how decisions in business can be improved. Researchers have looked at decisions that happen routinely and repetitively. What they found out is that deliberate practice involving action, feedback, modification and action again helps to improve decision-making.
Think about it. Almost everyone knows that the more you practice, the better you become at what you do. Yet in many areas you will find that just spending lots of time practising won’t necessarily make you better at what you are doing. What is needed is feedback so that you can take corrective action.
For routine decisions such as selling products to customers you would quickly adjust your selling approach if your initial attempts failed to close the sale. Feedback from your customers enables you to revise your approach and come up with more effective ways of selling your product or service. The same might happen in a retail store where you are deciding on products to sell in your store. Some might be dogs yet others may fly off your shelves.
Yet what about more strategic decisions such as coming up with a brand-new product or service and needing to decide on what customer segment or niche market you are going to sell to? This is not a routine, repeatable decision but a strategic one that if not successful can have a major impact on your future viability.
In these areas where strategic decisions need to be made for a small business or start up such as developing a new product, testing selected markets and introducing a marketing plan, it may be necessary to involve someone with prior experience and knowledge that can help you to make better decisions.
This is why many small business owners and start-ups rely on mentors, coaches and business adviser to assist them with non-routine decisions. With insight into products and markets business advisers can help correct and adjust decisions through detailed preparation, analysis and planning.
Tough conversations about how you are going to develop a good start-up idea and test it in the market or even reposition your existing business against a new and strong competitor, won’t only help prevent you from making blunders but will assist you to make decisions that are more viable for your business.
The other day I was talking to a restaurant owner who has become expert at using Twitter to build relationships with his customers. He finds it exciting because it relieves the boredom that sometimes creeps in during the day. Plus it gives him an opportunity to vent at things he finds wrong in society and elsewhere.
This is an example of a business person who has educated himself about the social Twitter site and uses it to communicate with customers, promote upcoming events, and publicise specials. His business tweets also help attract new and repeat customers to the shop. Continue reading “Small businesses are losing out by ignoring Twitter”
On our journey back from Cape Town during the holidays we stopped over at Bloemfontein, Free State, and spent the Friday evening and night at the Krugerdrift Dam about 35 km outside of the city. When it became dark and the insects started buzzing and chirping and the sound of the night owls wooing, one of our party went with a torchlight to get more firewood to keep the campfire going. The person came across a spiderweb and called all of us to come have a look. We saw how a small spider had spun a web and the entire web was filled with trapped insects. The spiderweb itself had a silvery beauty about it and the spider was happily munching on the small insects that it had been snared in its web in the dark.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to ensnare customers that came passing by but obviously not with such deadly consequences? Continue reading “Catch your customers with a spiderweb”
Have you had an experienced lately where you were treated poorly as a customer? How did you feel? Did it make you resolve with greater determination to serve your customers more effectively?
This is not one of those gripe sessions about experiencing poor customer service. We all have too many examples. Being kept waiting. Ignored even when we are standing in front of the cashier. Glaring errors with restaurant bills. Defective goods that we only find about later when we get home and have to fight to get a replacement or refund.
Continue reading “How to connect with customers in a deep and meaningful way”
The other day I was looking for a small speaker to play out of my cellphone because my ball speaker had blown out after about four years of use. I was in a hurry to get a new speaker and came across a Bluetooth wireless speaker. It sounded good in the music store and I bought it thinking that this was better than my original speaker, which despite the small size put out a mean sound.
I should have known better. This new speaker is almost useless in the car and doesn’t even put out enough sound in even a small-size living room.
Settling for the first thing you come across whatever you are searching for isn’t always the best thing to do. The same applies when generating new business ideas. If you settle for your first best idea, you may not be able to achieve as much if you continued pushing the envelope and coming up with even better ideas. Continue reading “Will you settle for your first best idea?”
When I was growing up in Kalk Bay a seal clubbing trawler called the Malgas worked out of the harbour. It would go down to Seal Island where the crew would club seals to death, load them onto the trawler, bring them back to Kalk Bay harbour and send them away for further processing.
As a little boy, I once saw a baby seal pup stuck in one of the big rubber tractor tyres that was used as a ballard to stop the wooden fishing boats bashing against the side of the key. A crew member from the Malgas took out a long gaff, gaffed the pup in its throat, pulled it aboard and skinned the baby seal alive. Continue reading “The power of invisible links”
I have a friend who is a professional fisherman but overnight he has lost the status “professional”. He has been fishing from Kalk Bay harbour, Cape Town, for over 40 years. He recently had a heart attack. A lot of it was due to putting his boat up on the costly slipway and spending a lot of money to refurbish the boat and fix up the engine so that his wooden commercial fishing boat is seaworthy.
Everything changed for him when out of the blue when and on 10 PM on 31 December 2013 the fisheries department confiscated licenses from over 300 traditional line fisherman whose families involvement in fishing go back for generations and dished them out as they saw fit.
It’s a tragic situation where thousands of traditional line fisherman all along the coast are now out of work, jobless. Millions invested in fishing boats and equipment are now sitting idle. Thousands of families have no income because the main breadwinner, the traditional line fishermen, have been robbed of their jobs.
I suppose from the fisheries perspective this seems like the right thing to do. It gives people who haven’t been in the fishing business an opportunity to enter the industry. It’s also probably well timed for vote-hungry politicians with an eye on the elections.
If you look at things from the point of view of the new entrance themselves, many would be pretty excited to make money from catching fish.
Who knows? In any legislation change there are going to be winners and losers.
The thing that really interests me is people who work in an industry or market for a long time don’t seem to think of upskilling themselves. Why is it that people can work for so many years in an industry but they seem to be oblivious of the changing circumstances around them? How come they don’t learn new skills?
I’m not pointing fingers. I’ve been there too. I also had my fair share of mistakes. What I’m talking about is people who don’t see the warning signs, try increase their skills or don’t diversify. Suddenly their livelihood is cut off.
If you think about it, it’s not only legislation that can be a risk to your livelihood but also technological obsolescence, demographic changes and simply trends that have changed in the market. Anything can be a threat or risk to your livelihood or business.
But it’s a lesson for all of us. Maybe if we’ve not been developing new skills, we might need to look into it. New skills whether for a craft, trade, engineering or professional services are all valuable for starting a new business or running one.
Yes, some might say that these line fishermen made so little money from their fishing because of the dwindling fishing stocks that are not being properly managed anymore that hey have never even had a chance to find opportunities to learn new skills. It’s a difficult one. This may well be the case for some of the older fisherfolk who could decide now to pack it in and not try anything else and live off their savings. For the young fisherfolk, they still have an opportunity to turn things around personally and move into new areas.
For those who are going into a new venture or doing something on their own such as starting a business from scratch, it would be worthwhile to try get a sense of how that industry or market will develop over the next 10 years or so. I know it’s very difficult to make predictions of this sort but when professions and markets can suddenly be shut off overnight with no compensation, no extended period for making alternative arrangements, no support for developing alternative skills and no regard whatsoever for human beings, then it pays to be sensitive to possible dangers lurking in the future.
Even so, for those smart entrepreneurs who can spot opportunities between the cracks and in the gaps, new possibilities will still be available. A smarter, sharper breed of entrepreneurs in the fishing industry have already started to develop opportunities for themselves. The money sometimes is not just in the harvesting, pulling up one fish at a time on a line. The food industry is expected to grow by something like 60% by 2030. Staying under the radar in h hard-working, difficult and dirty industries where you can do things faster and smarter and when no one can beat you in your game will offer rewards to entrepreneurs that are risk takers and have courage, work ethics and values.
